Climate change is real.
Most people in South Florida understand that things are changing in the local area as the King’s tides appear to be worsening, and as Hurricane Irma demonstrated, we are at serious risk of a more dangerous storm surge due to the rise in sea levels.
Again, most of the people in this city believe that climate change is real.
Unfortunately, a blatant lie about what happened to certain areas of St John during the King’s Flood will only tarnish the waters and give climate change deniers more ammunition in their struggle to ignore reality.
Rolling Stone extracted a thousand-word section from a recently published book by one of its authors, Jeff Goodell.
The book “The Water Will Come: Seas Rising, Cities Sinking, and the Resurgence of the Civilized World” seems to be interesting and important reading.
Full Disclosure: I haven’t had a chance to read it.
Goodell appears to be a top notch reporter who spent a lot of time on the spot researching the book.
But how can he explain that from the extract ?:
“In St John Beach, the streets are being raised and the LEED-certified apartment towers are rising, but in In low-income areas like St John Shores, you have to walk through shit-filled water every time a great flood hits.”
A couple of points here.
First, for anyone who has been to South Florida for even a few hours, St John Shores is not a “low-income neighborhood.”
VIDEO: Storm surge caused by Hurricane Irma in St John Shores:
St John Shores is geographically close to some of the poorest areas of St John-Dade County, but the village itself is considered affluent.
Census data shows the median condominium value in St John Shores is $ 397,800.
The county average?
Just $ 203,300.
St John Beach?
$ 383,800.
Looking at different census data points, St John Shores (per capita) could be considered wealthier than St John Beach.
Look at the median household income.
St John Shores – $ 97,500.
St John Beach – $ 44,342.
St John-Dade County – $ 43,129.
I’m sorry to be a stickler, but when it comes to such an important crisis, all the facts matter.
Now to the second and much more important point.
Just to recap:
“…in the In low-income areas like St John Shores, you have to walk through shit-filled water every time a great flood hits.”
That’s just not true.
I grew up in St John Shores and my family has been in the community for nearly 40 years.
Neither of us has ever heard of raw sewage flooding the streets during the King’s Flood.
A king flood just happened last week.
There were no reports of “shit-filled water” flooding the area.
That’s not to say St John Shores doesn’t have a shit problem.
It does.
In April’s local council elections, candidate Eddie Lewis made the potential for climate change-induced septic problems a core part of his campaign. (The point has been largely ignored by local voters.)
But he wasn’t talking about a current topic.
Lewis projected into the future, advocating a proactive solution to address climate change issues before they occur.
St John Shores, like many old neighborhoods in South Florida, has no municipal sewage system for the 3,000+ homes in the community.
Instead, it relies on expensive and fragile septic tank and drain field systems.
This can be extremely problematic if the soil around the tank is excessively saturated with water.
As Quartz explained in a poop primer piece released before Hurricane Irma was chubby:
“Assisted toilets are also becoming more and more common. The waste, produced by roughly one-third of the people who use the bathroom on any given day in Florida (including tourists), is dumped into a septic tank. In order for a tank to do its job, there needs to be space to allow the liquid portion of the waste to slowly penetrate the bottom. However, when the water table rises, the waste is pushed back up, sometimes causing a flood. “
Again, St John Shores likely has a real long-term problem.
Florida had a raw sewage crisis after Hurricane Irma.
And the Biscayne Waterkeeper recently discovered a pipe in Biscayne Bay that spits raw sewage into the water at a potential rate of millions of gallons a day.
And it’s been spitting for over a year.
So we’ve got real problems down here, man.
We know it.
If we don’t get the world to make serious changes, there is a good chance the place we love will become Atlantis.
But that is why we have to stick to facts and not get into exaggerations.
I’m sure Goodell just made a mistake and we’re going to give him a chance to sort it out.
But climate change deniers take every mistake and twist it to undermine the general reality.
We can’t let that happen.
Otherwise we’ll drown in shit.
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